This volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to the combinatory traditions that dominated premodern and early modern Japanese religion. Common to these traditions is the fact that they are based on the notion of honji suijaku ("the original forms of deities and their local traces"), which defines local deities as manifestations of universal divinities. The authors question received accounts of the interaction between Japanese Buddhism and Shinto, and present a more dynamic and variegated religious world, where pairings of Buddhist "originals" and local "traces" did not constitute one-to-one associations, but complex combinatory networks based on semiotic operations, doctrines, myths, and legends.
These chapters, based on specific case studies, discuss the honji suijaku paradigm from a number of different perspective, always combining historical and doctrinal analysis with interpretive insights.
